
Prototyping Supertitle
A few months ago I showed you this project for school students with English as an additional language. It was designed as a subtitling intervention to boost both educational standards and community integration. I’m quite excited about it. Today’s article is about the initial prototyping stages, I’m going to talk about both the things that went well and the things that went wrong.

There are several great things going on here. Neither I nor the teacher had any knowledge of Polish, and so the student knew that a) we weren’t going to be any help and b) we weren’t going to get the blame if someone snuck something rude into the translation. We were trusting them completely. More to the point – the deadline is a hard deadline. There parents are definitely turning up, and it’s going to be a pretty noticeable if the subtitling goes a bit quiet…
The students performed amazingly. The translated, proofread, rewrote, altered, worked thought. Some of them took on organising roles and every so often there would be a quick group conversation about such things as ‘Do we change character names to their Polish Equivalent?”
…and then the parents came. We took over a glassroom with a dataprojector and… everything worked. It just worked.
As a group we watched right the way though an episode of ‘Eve‘ correctly subtitled. It was wonderful. Once it finished I read the audience (with translation) the audience a congratulations message I’d got from the Series Producer of Eve, which got a really sweet reaction.